


we are waiting to be lit

by corleones



Category: Fairy Tales and Related Fandoms, Hansel and Gretel, Hänsel und Gretel | Hansel and Gretel (Fairy Tale)
Genre: F/M, Incest'11, India during the British Raj, Sibling Incest
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-12-31
Updated: 2011-12-31
Packaged: 2017-10-28 14:06:06
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 921
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/308649
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/corleones/pseuds/corleones
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Her brother reaches out his hand and takes hers and like that they begin their journey.</p>
            </blockquote>





	we are waiting to be lit

Her brother wakes her at dawn, throws the covers from her bed. He says, "sister, we are going to our grandmother's to fetch flour," and she thinks of how their grandmother lives in Bombay and how many miles there are in between home and the city but he is serious and his face is unsmiling so she puts on her shoes and ties up her hair in a scarf.

“How will we know the way?” she asks, looking back at the closed door of their home, their parents faces in the window, hard and thin - it has been a year without droughts and still their kitchens have been empty. She has heard it told that there is a new crown and a crown that demands more taxes but these are not women’s matters and so, she does not listen.

(Her brother has heard told of heads served on platters, of how the new crown is owed its bounty in the lives of men but these are not matters for children or girls and his sister is both so he keeps it to himself.

He is not good at hiding things from her, not stories of those who rule them and not the tales of how now the map that his father gave them to take them to the city is only an sheet of paper with some pictures drawn on it that crumples in his fingers.)

Her brother reaches out his hand and takes hers and like that they begin their journey.

-

They travel along the shore, making their way through fishing villages. They get by on theft and some sale, the loan of their services to fishermen and their wives and in this way, they fill their stomachs better than they did at home. The sister grows tall till her shoulders meet his and her skin is no longer mottled and sickly but burning to a kind of golden colour that burns his eyes if he looks at her for too long.

In August the monsoons come in, the tides wiping out beaches and stray children and stray dogs, claiming life with the same tepid consistency and savage heartlessness that once the brother heard, their crown was wont to do.

The tides come in. People lock their doors and their children behind them.

The brother and sister sit along the beach and the water tries its hardest to swallow them whole.

-

One night, the sister dreams that they have reached their grandmother’s house and instead of bread burning on the stove there is her severed head, cooking over the flames and men in uniform are waiting to grab her brother with white gloved hands and they take his throat like that, pulling his head onto their shoulders in a harsh embrace before they spill his blood onto their palms and drink it as she watches.

The morning after her dream, she burns his map.

She never opens it to see the pictures.

-

They do not mean to reach Bombay. This is what he says to the first man who sees them; “we did not mean to reach Bombay and he smiles, wide and toothless and said “no one means to reach Bombay” and then stared at the sister and her body in a way that made his fingers to turn to fists.

His sister grabbed his arm, “Leave it, bhai” and just like that, his anger dissolved to nothing as if she was trainer in a circus or a snake charmer and he, some wild beast who broke to nothing at a mere gesture.

He does not mind as much as he should. They are in Bombay.

Somewhere in this bright city is the door at which they were meant to arrive but she burned their map and now, they have no place to go.

-

There no soldiers along the walls. This is the most surprising thing of them all.

What is not surprising is the way the city unfurls his sister like a scarf that is flung out from the hip of a dancing girl, twisting her body into new shapes.

They take a room in an inn for the night. “In the morning.” he says, “We will write to our parents and we will find our grandmother,” and she in her new body, nods and her braid slaps against her breasts in the motion and he stares and stares.

The man who hands them the key assumes they are husband and wife because they had better not be lovers because this is not that kind of place and the brother nods and takes the key, gripping it till the metal bites into his hand.

He tastes his sister, her new rough skin that smells of salt, not the salt of the sea but the salt of the city, the city that has coated itself on her body within a single day and it scares him, the way she looks and the way she moves now, so wholly corrupted so he pushes her back against the dirty sheets of the one night cheap hotel and licks the taint from her flesh, his mouth not stopping till he can be sure that she is clean, thorough in this consideration of duty.

Beneath him, she makes sounds that the whores never do, sounds that fill in his ears like coins, rich and gasping as the sun makes slow progress around the earth.  
-

In the morning, they will go to their grandmother’s.

His sister says that she can already smell the bread.


End file.
